GamePlan: New tool for Unity game design, bug tracking, and remembering what you were just doing.

Hi,

This is something I made for myself to keep track of things better in my own Unity projects, and I'd like to hear your feedback while I'm getting it ready for public consumption.

I've been using Unity for commercial products since version 1, and I've shipped around 40 games, usually as part of a team effort. The absolute number one problem I've run into with *every single project* is communicating how a program is designed, or at least how it's supposed to work. Even with my own designs, I don't remember a month later exactly how I built something.

So for the last year, I've been adapting another product I built, to help me keep track of how my Unity projects work, and how other projects work when I'm hired to help finish them.

It resides in your assets folder, and it lets you drag and drop items into it to create references to things in your game, whether they're files and assets, interactions between objects, or even gameplay. It can also take screenshots, store lengthy scripts, and generally mark up images, all without affecting your own images in Unity, without any script recompiling, and without requiring any reloading. I keep these in my SVN Repos, so they're available to everyone on the teams I work with.

Each GamePlan file consists of an unlimited number of pages, and you can store anything you want on each page. Links to files and scenes are 'live', in that you can double-click them to launch those files. It's entirely free-form. You can add simple primitives (boxes, circles, and lines), text of course, and draw directly on top of anything.

This is a screenshot of a page I created to explain how the a particular sprite works in the GUI of a game I'm working on right now. I guarantee I won't remember how this works a week from now, but with this single page, I can refer back to it, and in a minute or so, know exactly what I was thinking. If I double-click on a file, it opens that file. Double-click on an image, and it opens that image in my image editor. Double-click on text and I can edit it on the page. You get the picture.

Personally, I use it for bug tracking, taking notes, general game design, and mocking up things while I'm talking to clients. And it's radically changed how efficient I am at working on multiple projects simultaneously, as well as completely eliminating the time it takes to remember WTF I was thinking when I built something.

So I'd like your feedback. Would this be useful to you?

Thanks!
-Chilton Webb


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This looks almost unbelievably useful. The answer to your question is 'yes,' qualified only with the requirement that these 'maps' be much faster to build and edit than referring back to one's own code / ongoing documentation for reference. What a fantastic tool you've created!

 

Conceptually, sweet. I always wanted to be able to comment my scenes/projects/etc. the same way I can comment my code. I started making something similar myself once, but it never got to the point where I was using it on live projects.

My main feedback is that your image doesn't show me how it fits into my workflow or how I actually use it. I get that the text bubbles show notes attached to things, but how do those notes appear in the Editor?

 

yeah... how does this work??
how much extra time and work does it require?

regardless, this is very interesting and seems incredibly useful... if its not too much of a pain to throw it together..

is it like a window that just accepts drag and drops? .. or its a file structure thing?
asset folder like in the Windows Explorer?? .. or you mean In-Unity asset folder??

...
this sounds Really cool!! , if its not a pain...

.. right now iam like, just learning Unity... im getting pretty good, but i want to KNOW IT ALL!!
this seems like itd help people learn like crazy

 

As you describe it, it does sound very useful, especially since it sounds loose and free form. The real test/value would come from how response it is and how you interact with it. Look forward to hearing more.

 

I think you are on the right track. The biggest missing tools right now in software development are tools like these. something to visualize the current overall architecture of your software and being able to go as Micro as you want on it. Keep going!

 

This is nice, especially for us visual people. Now if I can only get the programmers to use it.

 

Sounds like a good idea to me. I'm not sure how much I'd use it, but I can definitely imagine that there are those who would. (Personally, I'd just type the name of the file instead of linking to it. It's a nice feature, but I can't imagine spending the time to make it work, even with drag-n-drop.)

 

For software/design in general, there are tons of tools, Viso/Graffle are the standards, though we have been using gliffy a lot because of the Jira plugin, and because it is online. But there are others as well.

His tool appears to be more of light weight, free flow note taking type tool. Which, if in-editor, is fantastic, especially with the references to assets. It also would be great if the content for it was part of the project so it can be under version control (passing notes along to team-members..

 

Well, I'm stoked to see this might be of help to people. I love it, but I'm obviously biased, and I'm frankly scatterbrained as it is.

This version is not in-editor. At one point, it was, but I had some personal requirements that turned this into a standalone app that happens to be geared specifically for Unity.

Some of the reasons in favor of it being an external tool:
1) The ability to compare notes among multiple projects simultaneously. I often have a problem where the behavior in one project from a month ago has changed, and I can't figure out why. So I go to that project, carefully document and screenshot everything relevant, then open the new project, and compare notes. If it required that these ran in-editor, I would need to copy the documents back and forth to do that, which would get messy.

2) Library: I have a ton of GamePlan docs I consider my library of useful stuff. Code snippets, directions for how to properly set up slightly complicated things like RTP, NGUI, TerrainBuilder, WorldBuilder, etc. I'm still learning Materializer, and it's already 3 pages of notes. These go in a folder outside the rest of my projects, so I can use them at any time. I have one GamePlan doc in particular that includes all of my standard scripts, along with notes about how to do 3D math that I can't seem to remember.

3) I also needed something that was *FAST*. As in, GTF out of my way and let me dump things into it when I need to. Paths need to be *unity friendly*, and immediate. So if I drag and drop a script file and a scene file into a GamePlan doc, and drag in a few models too, and put notes on there, when I send that to the repo, everyone else on the team can update that doc, and double-click on those links, and they'll open the right files. Even if their directory structure above the main project directory is different.

Regarding other apps, I wrote this out of absolute frustration with the other tools out there. I won't name names, but they have let me down so many times now it's not funny. Apps that embed images in a helper folder are out of the question, since that gets parsed by Unity. Apps that don't respect the Unity assets folder hierarchy are out of the question. Apps that are bogged down in dialog boxes, or that require a lot of steps to get things on the screen are out of the question.

I needed something that didn't have a bunch of palettes, with a ton of different brushes and tools. I wanted fast, simple, and out of the way most of the time. And most importantly, I didn't want my clean, empty space cluttered up with someone else's S*** UI. I wanted clean and empty, so I can put my own stuff there. Since I work on a laptop, I don't have as much screen real estate as desktop users do, so I really don't like software that puts a giant 200px list of files on one side of the screen, 100px of ribbons and toolbars on the top, and another 200 of info panels on the other side.

So GamePlan's UI takes up very little room, and has a very simple, consistent, contextual tool system. There's basically a "drawing mode" and an "everything else" mode. It'll all make sense as soon as I whip up a video, I think. Again, I've spent years working on this, so the workflow is pretty smooth. I think the first time I showed it off to a client, we were discussing the big move to Unity 2.0

Let's see, one of the main reasons I use links to files here is that in large projects (which seems to be the only kind I get to work on anymore), there'll be several files with similar names, in different folders. Just using a filename is fine when there's just one script folder, for example. When there are a dozen, and the names are extremely subtle ("rotate.cs vs rotator.cs"), it starts getting hard to manage without something helping me.

Thanks guys, I'll post more info soon!
-Chilton

 

This looks fantastic. I was looking for something like this in unity, especially something to just tack bugs easier. Would love to see more when you have updates.

 

Looks useful not only for advance users but for beginners a like.

 

Trying to get a beta out this weekend for you guys.

Also trying to launch three games and a utility. Busy weekend

-Chilton

 

Hi Chilton, How's that beta?

 

Question, how easy will it be to share pages with team members? If my programmer shows me something, I would like to be able to have him send me the page so I can use it to remember how to do something, like setting up a specific controller or putting animations on an object. Will it work for this purpose as well?

 

I have been selfishly keeping this to myself. I got it working well enough for my own needs, got wrapped up in a big project, and forgot I'd told anyone about it. Yikes. I'll fix that this week and get you guys a beta.

Tella, that's exactly the idea--you can copy a page straight out of it and send it to them, they can open it, and assuming you're using the same base project, your links should just work. Of course, that's the 'pie in the sky' version, but at the very least, you are able to see what how to assemble things.

-Chilton

 

If this is actually usable and clear, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Being able to comment stuff on the fly and have it clearly visible somewhere is gold. I have a 'notes' behaviour I throw on to stuff sometimes, but thats crappy and its frequently out of sight when i'm making changes, so i forget to update it.

If this actually works nicely and isnt just another thing in the inspector bar, I would throw money at you. Well, at least like a $20 or something